Universal Pictures presents Violent Night exclusively in UK cinemas from December 2, 2022. You can also catch Neil and Martin discussing the film on the latest edition of the GYCO Podcast.
Synopsis
When a team of mercenaries breaks into a wealthy family compound on Christmas Eve, taking everyone inside hostage, the team isn’t prepared for a surprise combatant: Santa Claus (David Harbour, Black Widow, Stranger Things series) is on the grounds, and he’s about to show why this Nick is no saint.
Review
Have you ever considered what a child of Die Hard and Home Alone might look like? Well throw in a touch of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and you’ve got Tommy Wirkola’s Violent Night.
The director of 2009’s Dead Snow is back with a holiday-themed movie which is the perfect antidote to sickly sweet Christmas movies. Written by Sonic the Hedgehog 2’s Pat Casey & Josh Miller, Violent Night is a spiritual successor to other 87North Productions’ Nobody in the vein of the success of film’s like Atomic Blonde and John Wick. It proves, once again, that this genre of adult action movies is very much alive and well.
Clocking in at 104 minutes, the film is teetering on the verge of running a little long. The first act goes to great lengths to setup the Lightstone family, the group at the centre of the kidnapping plot, but not before introducing us to David Harbour’s Santa. We first find him drowning his sorrows in pub that is supposedly in “Bristol, England”. Unfortunately the location itself is about as far removed from Bristol as you can get. It did pull me out of the movie but only for the duration of it’s strangely sprawling, high rise, city-like appearance.
Back to the aforementioned Lightstone family. We’re introduced to them through the eyes of Jason (Alex Hassell), the most human of the Lightstone-clan. He rebels against the family wealth – sort of – in a last ditch attempt to rescue his marriage to the brilliantly cast Alexis Louder as Linda. Along with their daughter Trudy, newcomer Leah Brady, they travel to the family mention to spend Christmas with Jason’s mother, Gertrude. The second her voice booms through the speakers it’s clear we have Christmas movie royalty on the scene in the form of Beverly D’Angelo. Yes. THE Ellen Griswald is in the house.
They’re joined at the festivities by Alva (Edinburgh Patterson), Jason’s sister. Then there’s her boyfriend, the clearly struggling Hollywood actor Morgan, played by Cam Gigandet (Twilight) and Alva’s son Bertrude (Alexander Elliot), hilariously named after his grandmother
As Christmas Eve rolls on, the family is taken hostage by John Leguizamo’s Scrooge and his team of aptly named Christmas goons. Having seen the trailer for Violent Night I was fooled in to thinking that Santa would visit the household to exact revenge on the group for holding Trudy hostage. But her connection to Santa via a walkie-talkie is a little more coincidental and his involvement in the events are also fairly coincidental.
Harbour is perfectly cast as this jaded, not-so-jolly version of Saint Nick. It’s clear from the outset that he’s over the whole idea of Christmas, particularly thanks to the greed of humanity. It’s set up perfectly in Casey and Miller’s script in the sense that it’s Santa who has lost his Christmas spirit, that favourite trope of the holiday movie genre.
Violent Night follows in the footsteps of movies like Nobody in giving great context to its motivations. It isn’t simply a case that Santa finds himself in this scenario and starts kicking ass. Through Trudy he rediscovers his connection to humanity and it motivates him to stay behind and rescue the family. As Christmas movies go, it’s the perfect catalyst for the action scenes to come.
The amount of humour in Violent Night was the biggest surprise. Early in the film it’s explained that Trudy has just seen Home Alone for the first time and that leads to come excellent scenes later on. As Trudy escapes and hides in the loft, Santa encourages her to build booby traps to keep herself safe and this leads to some truly laugh out loud moments. It’s going to be fun to see how audiences react to seeing Trudy gleefully re-enact some of Kevin’s greatest Home Alone hits. But put it this way, she almost eclipsed Santa in terms of kills.
The action itself is exactly how we’ve come to expect it in this type of movie. It’s fast, unrelenting and often gruesome. As the name suggests, Violent Night is not a film you want to sit down and watch the kids on Christmas Eve. The stunt choreography is typically top notch. Nothing about the length fight scenes feels scripted or staged. Characters keep the Christmas aesthetic by using tinsel, Christmas lights and no end of props to ramp up the tension. As for Santa himself? You only need hear about Skullcrusher, his favourite hammer, to know what he’s capable of…
Verdict
I’ve found my new favourite festive movie. Harbour is perfectly cast in this unabashedly violent, funny and surprisingly heartfelt holiday classic.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
